Astronomy Cast
Summary: Astronomy Cast offers you a fact based journey through the cosmos. Each week Fraser Cain (Universe Today) and Dr. Pamela Gay (SIUE / Slacker Astronomy) take on topics ranging from the nearby planets to ubiquitous dark matter.
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- Artist: Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay
- Copyright: Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay
Podcasts:
Ep. 85: Detectors
Have you ever wondered what it takes to get a spacecraft off the Earth and into space. And how managers at NASA can actually navigate a spacecraft to another planet? And how does a gravity assist work? And how do they get them into orbit? And how do they land? So many questions…
Ep. 84: Getting Around the Solar System
Have you ever heard that photons behave like both a particle and a wave and wondered what that meant? It's true. Sometimes light acts like a wave, and other times it behaves like a little particle. It's both. This week we discuss the experiments that demonstrate this, explain how scientists figured it all out in the first place. What does wave/particle duality have to do with astronomy? Well, everything, since light is the only way astronomers can see out into the Universe.
Ep. 83: Wave Particle Duality
We're polluting every corner of our own planet, so it only makes sense that we'll take our trashy habits out into space with us. This week we look at the myriad of ways we're messing up space, from the trash orbiting the planet to the radiation we're leaking out into space.
Ep. 82: Space Junk
As predicted we got a lot of questions from people about our trilogy of shows on the size, shape and centre of the universe. Today we'll do our best to clear them all up.As always, if you're still confused drop us an email to info at astronomycast dot com.
Ep. 81: Questions on the Shape Size and Centre of the Universe
Pamela's attending the 39th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference, and you know what that means: the Moon… and planets! When you think of the Moon, you think of craters. In fact, that's a big theme this week at the conference, so Pamela took it as inspiration. Here you go, the week we drove the show into a crater. Wait… there's got to be a better way to describe this.
Ep. 80: Craters
We’re ready to complete our trilogy of discovery about the universe. We’ve learned that it has no center; rather everywhere is its center and nowhere. We discovered that the universe seems to be flat. It not open, it is not closed, it is flat. If that doesn’t make any sense, you need to listen to the previous show because there’s no way I could give that an explanation. So now we want to know: “How big is it?” Does it go on forever or is it finite in scale? How much of it can we see?
Ep. 79: How Big is the Universe?
Some of the biggest questions in the universe depend on its shape. Is it curved? Is it flat? Is it open? Those may not make that much sense to you, but in fact it’s very important for astronomers. So which is it? How do we know? How did we figure it out? Why does it matter?
Ep. 78: What is the Shape of the Universe?
